The efficiency of your organization’s business processes is paramount to its success and the stability of your bottom line. Every business uses dozens of processes every day, so inefficient processes can cost your business dearly – causing unhappy customers, stressed colleagues, missed deadlines, and increased costs. Here are some tips to help you speed up your processes, and get the most out of your business.
Identify Your Processes
The first step in any new business strategy is to establish where you are now, and when it comes to streamlining and speeding up processes this is just as vital. You may not have evaluated the processes in your business before, so sit down and really consider what they are! Processes can be formal or informal, so make sure you’re identifying both – formal processes can be easier to spot as they’re largely to do with legal or financial areas of the business; whereas informal processes are generally to do with the infrastructure that you’ve created for your business – they’re just as important to the overall efficiency of the business though – so don’t overlook them!
Evaluate and Improve
Once you’ve identified the various processes your business uses, you need to evaluate which are working well and which aren’t. Generally if you’ve done a thorough inspection it’s fairly obvious which are which, but it could be a good idea to set up an impromptu committee to ensure you’re seeing the processes from all angles of the business. Together you can consider questions like: where are my colleagues getting frustrated? Where do costs or quality go up or down? Do any of the steps of this process cause delays? By asking questions like these you can be sure that you’re addressing the root cause of the problem, rather than just fixing the symptoms. Speak to the people who are affected by the process. What do they think is wrong with it? And what suggestions do they have for improving it? By doing this you can create an effective strategy to streamline your processes for the long term, and those involved at every level will feel involved at an early stage, and will therefore be more receptive to any changes you need to make. It’s vitally important that you make only changes that are specific to your industry and will have genuine longevity, rather than following any tech trends and finding your improvements outdated in a matter of years, or even months. The best advice here is to adopt only those technological improvements that have already been adopted by a number of big businesses – so you know that most likely those initial tech kinks have been worked out. For example, if you run a retail business you might have thought contactless payment technology was a fad, but as many supermarkets and high street chains have now adopted it – you can feel secure in the knowledge that it’s here to stay, and make the most of it for your business. A company like Card Cutters can provide a guide to investing in a contactless terminal, if you would like to know more.